LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas has not been among the Republicans frequently named as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, but he would like that to change.

“I’m keeping the door open,” Mr. Huckabee said in an interview here Thursday night about the possibility of seeking his party’s nomination again. “I think right now the focus needs to be on 2014, but I’m mindful of the fact that there’s a real opportunity for me.”

…Mr. Huckabee dismissed the notion that pride was a factor in his decision to float a possible campaign.

If Huckabee does decide to run again, I will as usual be waiting to see if he is willing to release the text of his sermons from back in the day. He has always been rather reluctant to do so. Can’t think why.

As condolences and reflections followed the passing of Nelson Mandela, Rick Santorum linked the injustices the former South African president fought and Obamacare.

“He was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives — and Obamacare is front and center in that,” Santorum said Thursday on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Not quite the same, I feel.

Andrew Sullivan notes that Santorum, a politician who misses few opportunities to stress his piety, is “a Catholic fighting against universal healthcare”.

Sullivan’s point, of course, is that the Roman Catholic church supports the principle of universal healthcare (while reserving the right to opt out of the bits of which it disapproves). That doesn’t mean that devout Catholics cannot disagree with Obamacare, but it does makes the force of the language used by Santorum come acriss as, well, striking….

Rick Santorum is asking you to do your part to free movie theatres from the Devil’s clutches by purchasing tickets to his upcoming movie, The Christmas Candle. He appeared on the Trinity Broadcasting Network last week to plug the new movie of his film company EchoLight Studios, which apparently is in a state of internal strife after his arrival as CEO. While speaking on a network where televangelists on a daily basis tell viewers that God will reward them financially if they send in contributions, the former senator and presidential candidate spent most of the time criticizing movies for being too materialistic.

Santorum, who has previously said that Satan has control over mainline Protestantism and universities, thanked viewers in advance for seeing the movie. “This is a tough business, this is something that we’re stepping out,” Santorum said, “and the Devil for a long, long time has had this, these screens, for his playground and he isn’t going to give it up easily.”

It may just be me, but I’m not entirely convinced that Santorum is helping build a GOP brand that can sweep to victory in 2014 and 2016.

I can understand the argument that religion can be a handy bulwark against an over-mighty and over-intrusive state (it can, incidentally, also be an ally of just such a state), but there is a limit as to how far that argument can be pushed, and in this speech to CPAC Rick Santorum has just crashed through it (not for the first time in his case) into a twilight zone of demagoguery, hysteria and madly Manchicean either/or.

I’m no fan of Obama, to put it mildly, but to claim that he wants to create a “Godless” America is not only silly (in fact, if anything Obama would probably want to recruit God as some sort of assistant, a super-Biden upstairs, in his attempt to transform the country) but is language almost certainly guaranteed to alienate yet more of the voters that the GOP needs to be winning over.

Here’s Josh Barro writing for Forbes with details of some Santorum plans for wasteful and intrusive government:

The Daily Caller flags a little-discussed position paper on Rick Santorum’s campaign website—his pledge to aggressively prosecute those who produce and distribute pornography. Santorum avers that “America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography.” He pledges to use the resources of the Department of Justice to fight that “pandemic,” by bringing obscenity prosecutions against pornographers.

I would note that this is very different from what the Bush Administration did. The Bush DOJ did establish an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005, but this body focused on bringing prosecutions against small-time producers who made porn with extreme content. (Even so, it faced significant pushback from U.S. Attorneys, some of whom viewed such prosecutions as a distraction and a misuse of resources.) Many social conservative groups were disappointed with the task force, contending that more mainstream hardcore porn violates obscenity laws, and they urged the Bush Administration to bring obscenity cases against major producers.

Santorum promises that he would do exactly this. His statement references going after pornography that is distributed not just on the Internet, but also “on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV.” Perhaps I am not staying in the most interesting hotels, but my impression is that porn distributed through such channels is almost definitionally not extreme. Santorum’s statement also touts his work on this issue with “groups including Morality in Media, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association”—many of which were among the groups calling on the Bush Administration to prosecute mainstream porn producers in 2007. And he says he “proudly support[s] the efforts of the War on Illegal Pornography Coalition,” which advocates the use of obscenity laws against mainstream porn.

Some of Santorum’s defenders have taken the tack of separating his personal views from his policy views. Santorum thinks contraception is “not OK” and he has announced his intention to use the bully pulpit to discuss “the dangers of contraception.” But he doesn’t think contraception should be illegal, and he voted for Title X contraception subsidies (though he said in a recent debate that he opposes Title X, despite voting for it.) On pornography, though, Santorum’s views can’t be written off as purely personal—he has stated a clear intent to use the levers of government to stop adults from making and watching porn.

Via the Washington Post, but even so this is not, perhaps, the most surprising news:

The fragile gains Republicans had been making among female voters have been erased, a shift that has coincided with what has become a national shouting match over reproductive issues, potentially handing President Obama and the Democrats an enormous advantage this fall.

In the 2010 congressional midterm elections, Republican candidates ran evenly with Democrats among women, a break with long-established trends. That was a major reason the GOP regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Now, female voters appear to be swinging back to Democrats.

A number of polls show that Obama’s approval among women has risen significantly since December, even as it has remained flat among men. The same trend, which began before the controversy in recent weeks, is also showing up further down the ballot.

When a Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey asked in the summer which party should control Congress, 46 percent of women favored Democrats and 42 percent preferred Republican control.

But in a survey released Monday, compiling data since the beginning of the year, that figure had widened considerably to a 15-point advantage for the Democrats, according to polling by the team of Democratic pollster Peter Hart and Republican Bill McInturff. Fifty-one percent favored Democratic control; only 36 percent wanted to see the Republicans in charge…

Both sides have tried to shape the narrative in this battle for and about women. But many Republicans are beginning to wish they had never waded into what has become a heated conversation over contraception, who should have it and what it says about people who use it.

GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s campaign, said Republicans need to return to pocketbook and fiscal issues. “We know what works,” she said, “and we need to get back to it.”

Quite.

And even those who saw the “contraception” controversy as being over religious freedom rather than contraception should have realized the political dangers of the territory into which they were sailing, and navigated it with distinctly more skill than they have shown.

Terri Schiavo, part deux? We’ll have to see, but there can be no doubt that, under these circumstances, choosing Santorum, a character with strongly-held views on the , uh, perversity of contraception (“a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”), as the GOP’s nominee would both drown out any argument over religious freedom and be an extraordinary act of electoral self-destruction.

[Santorum] lambasted the president’s health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, “because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

On the other hand Santorum probably does approve of the prenatal testing discussed by David Frum here:

…It is the Obama administration that is winning the communications war. Republicans blame the media. OK, maybe. But then Republicans do things like this in the state of Virginia:

HB 462 Abortion; informed consent, shall undergo ultrasound imaging.

“Abortion; informed consent. Requires that, as a component of informed consent to an abortion, to determine gestation age, every pregnant female shall undergo ultrasound imaging and be given an opportunity to view the ultrasound image of her fetus prior to the abortion. The medical professional performing the ultrasound must obtain written certification from the woman that the opportunity was offered and whether the woman availed herself of the opportunity to see the ultrasound image or hear the fetal heartbeat. A copy of the ultrasound and the written certification shall be maintained in the woman’s medical records at the facility where the abortion is to be performed. This bill incorporates HB 261.”

The ABC news report on the Virginia bill explains:

“The ultrasound legislation would constitute an unprecedented government mandate to insert vaginal ultrasonic probes into women as part of a state-ordered effort to dissuade them from terminating pregnancies, legislative opponents noted.”

Say what you will about Santorum, it’s difficult to argue that he is a man who succumbs to the vapid ecumenicism that dominates so much of the discourse we hear these days from the, uh, “faith community”.

We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. […]

The polling data relied upon for thisWashington Post article is from a Democratic polling firm, but the results should come as no great surprise:

The firm’s poll finds that one of the most important factors powering Obama’s gains against likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney has been the President’s improving numbers among unmarried women, a key pillar of the present and future Democratic coalition.

Among this group, Obama now leads Romney by 65-30 — and there’s been a net 18-point swing towards the President among them:…After unmarried women dropped off for Dems in 2010 and were slow to return to the Dem fold in 2011, Obama is now approaching the 70 percent he won among them in 2008.

Unmarried women will be important to Obama’s success at rebuilding his 2008 coalition in time for reelection, something that already seems to be underway, as Ronald Brownstein has demonstrated. The crack Post polling team tells me that the key to understanding this constituency is that it’s complex and diverse; it includes young women who have never married, divorced women, and widows, and it cuts across class, racial, income, and geographic lines.

Various factors — the improving economy; the drawn-out Republican nomination process; the GOP’s sinking approval ratings — already seem to be driving unmarried women back towards Obama. And the pitched battle over birth control could continue to galvanize and unite this group behind him, particularly if Romney is forced to embrace the conservative position. The Greenberg poll also tested the two sides’ position on this issue, and found that 61 percent of unmarried women side with the Democratic one.

Concludes the memo: “We may yet look back on this debate and wonder whether this was a Terri Schiavo moment.”

The chances that this will indeed be the case will increase substantially if Santorum is the nominee. To use a hackneyed term, elections are all about the “narrative” and the narrative says that Santorum wants to ban contraception. He can deny that all he wants (and that’s just what he’s doing), but he’s said enough in the past to ensure that there are a lot of people who will never believe him. That will tell at the polls should Santorum become the nominee.

The top donor behind a pro-Rick Santorum super-PAC said Thursday that contraception doesn’t have to be costly because women used to use aspirin for birth control.

“This contraceptive thing, my gosh it’s so inexpensive. You know back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception,” Foster Friess, the major donor behind the pro-Santorum Red White and Blue Fund super-PAC said on MSNBC. “The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

Friess was referencing an old saying that women who held their knees closely together would have to remain abstinent.